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I bought some adorable tiny potatoes and mini zucchini this week and my mind immediately went not to showcasing their tiny cuteness but to how I could transform them into that day’s lunch (I was hungry when I went shopping).

I have a hard time with lunch. The ideal lunch dish to me has multiple components (i.e., is fun to eat) but requires no more than an hour of prep and is something I will be happy to eat several days in a row, if not the whole week. With my mini vegetables in hand, my thoughts when to tacos. Continue reading →

It started with applesauce. Could I make a batch from apples cooked on the grill? Maybe the idea was too forced. Or maybe the results would be amazing. Easy enough to try, right? I cored and sliced an apple into rings, and put them on the grill. They were soft and tasty in five minutes. But do the apples need to be cut first? Continue reading →

One new-to-me ingredient I kept seeing mention of in my vegan recipe research was jackfruit, and the young, unripe fruit tastes just like pulled pork when simmered in barbecue sauce. The fresh, ripe fruit can grow to up to 100 pounds and is incredibly sweet, with a smell not unlike durian. The now popular ‘meat substitute’ version is the unripe, not yet sweet fruit that has been preserved in brine. I finally had some time this weekend, tracked down cans at a Vietnamese grocer, and tried it for myself.

Mark made me and another colleague toasted homemade bread and fried eggs the other day. I was lucky enough to meet the hen responsible—one of two yard birds that linger by the kitchen door waiting for handouts—and even luckier to watch Mark cook it. Continue reading →

Everyone says that leftovers are “the best part of Thanksgiving,” but your leftovers can be so much more than dry meat on bread with mayonnaise. My new book Kitchen Matrix has 20 recipes for leftover turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce, along with a slew of tantalizing uses for extra veggies (and if you’re anything like me, you’ll have a lot of those). You’ll have to buy the book if you want all the recipes, but here are a few clever uses for leftover cranberry sauce. These are universal enough to accommodate almost whatever kind of cranberry sauce you’re starting with (even the canned kind).

Cook chicken parts in butter, rotating and turning as necessary, until browned on all sides; remove from the pan. Add chopped onion, garlic, and fresh ginger and cook until soft. Stir in cranberry sauce and a little chicken or turkey stock or white wine; add the chicken. Cover and cook over medium-low heat, turning the chicken occasionally until it’s cooked through. Garnish: grated orange zest.

My new dream job is to get healthier food onto the plates of more Americans. See below for an excerpt from my recent story in Time.

Could there be a better week to form a company specializing in vegan meals? As everyone knows, the World Health Organization last week labeled processed meat a carcinogen and said red meat was probably dangerous as well. Not news, exactly, but a further confirmation that plant-based diets are where it’s at.

It was the determination to get healthier food onto the dinner plates of more Americans that led me to leave the New York Times, where I had what most people would think was a dream job: as weekly Opinion columnist and the lead food writer for the Sunday Magazine. But really: Not only was I ready for something new, it felt like it was time to put my boots on the ground.

So when David Mayer contacted me, I was primed. Mayer is the lead investor in The Purple Carrot, a plant-based meal kit company founded in Boston by Andy Levitt last year. Dave, who never uses 100 words when he can use 1,000, wrote me a long e-mail that said, among other salient things, that he wanted to build a company so people would “cook meals with real food, talk about it, show their kids what cooking is and connect on that and what it means. Imagine the implications … if we could help …. hundreds of millions of Americans to eat vegan at least two nights a week. Make it easy, really good and affordable.”

In case you missed it, I’m joining The Purple Carrot as co-founder, partner and Chief Innovation Officer. Here’s a great piece by Matt Rodbard in Food Republic with some more details.

Photograph by Eric Tanner

Mark Bittman Put His Money Where His Mouth Is

Why the activist-columnist left journalism to run a vegan startup

In fairness, the offal was sent compliments of the kitchen.

Mark Bittman grabs the ramekin of chicken liver brûlée with a hand the size of an NBA power forward’s before breaking through the caramelized crust with a dagger of crusty bread. I’ve met the author of the best-selling VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 for lunch at the Breslin, April Bloomfield’s New York City restaurant famous for lamb burgers and boards stacked with liverwurst and head cheese. “Today is a bad day,” says Bittman when asked about breaking his famous meat-and-dairy-free-during-daylight edict during our flowing conversation, which skips between millennial slackerdom, Bill Clinton and Bittman’s next chapter after leaving TheNew York Times in September: He is serving as chief innovation officer at vegan meal-kit delivery service Purple Carrot, which was officially announced this morning. “But, really, we are celebrating, so it’s not so bad,” he says with a laugh.

The lunch was part of a two-day media blitz promoting the author’s latest book, which was being released that day, a compilation of his popular New York Times Magazinecolumn Kitchen Matrix. Earlier in the morning, the tall and trim 65-year-old had been hawking the book on television and NPR, and later he will tape with the “really intense” Dr. Oz. So it’s clear the dude deserves a basket of beer-battered Long Island fluke and Bloomfield’s supreme pomme frites. “You should eat some of these,” he insists in a long-simmered Manhattan drawl. Bittman was raised in New York City’s Stuyvesant Town, and until earlier this year lived mostly in the Northeast — between Boston, Connecticut and New York City — before relocating to Northern California in January. “Living in Berkeley is fucking awesome,” he says with a smile. And with a new job building a plant-based cooking brand, his first full-time gig outside of media in over 30 years, the roaring startup economy might be pretty fucking awesome for Mark Bittman, too.